


Daydream

by Anonymous



Category: Among Us (Video Game)
Genre: Alien Diseases, Canon-Typical Violence, Hallucinations, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-05
Updated: 2020-10-05
Packaged: 2021-03-07 23:00:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 985
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26841787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Cyan hallucinates about his crewmates murdering each other.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 26
Collections: Anonymous





	Daydream

Cyan thinks maybe he’s going insane.

It starts with vague impressions, shades flickering in and out of sight when he turns a corner or enters a room, and it happens more often in the morning. It’s fine; it goes away after he has his morning cup of coffee. He’s probably just tired.

But then comes a day when he wakes up feeling like he’s at the bottom of the ocean, with a hundred tons of pressure weighing him down and clogging his ears. Every movement is a slow struggle against the tide. But Cyan isn’t a quitter; he did centrifuge training more times than he cares to remember and this pressure is a cakewalk compared to that, so he’s not going to let this—cold? Migraine?—keep him down. Dragging himself out of bed takes a minute longer than it should have, but he goes through the motions of his morning routine anyway. He ignores how the soft electrical hum of the ship around him seems louder, and how the fluorescent lights seem brighter. He pretends he doesn’t notice when he imagines another crewmate’s footsteps in the empty corridor. It’s just a migraine, it’s just sounds echoing from another part of the ship, it’s all fine.

Everything is fine.

And then he walks into Weapons and sees Lime crouching over Pink’s disemboweled corpse, holding his severed arm tenderly and sucking blood and muscle out of the stump.

He doesn’t think. Just sprints forward, pulls his standard issue blaster from his hip, fires—

Both Lime and Pink disappear. The blood pooling on the floor is gone; the tan linoleum tile is stained only with a black scorch mark from his shot. If Lime and Pink had been real, it would have shredded straight through Lime’s torso and left her insides looking like confetti.

If they had been real.

His arm drops limply back to his side and the gun clatters to the ground. He only has time to take one step back before half a dozen people pile into the room.

What follows is a barrage of questions that sends Cyan reeling. His ears are ringing: the concussive bang of the shot, the too-loud buzz of electricity from the walls, and the phantom sound of wet slurping as Lime  _ ate Pink _ all mix together in his head and make his crewmates’ words incomprehensible.

Then a hand claps down on his shoulder and a friendly, familiar voice says, “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, man. What the hell happened?”

Cyan turns, and there’s Pink, right as rain and smelling a bit like garbage. Not splayed halfway over the console with his arm ripped off, brutally murdered. The tide recedes with the touch: everything that was too-loud, too-much returns to normal with a swiftness that leaves Cyan feeling confused and uncoordinated.

“I...” Cyan starts. His tongue is dry. “I saw—“

“Oh shit,” Pink interrupts. He hunches his shoulders and peers around Cyan to look at the scorch mark. “Was it one of those lesser winged scorpion-roaches? Those things scare the bajeezus out of me. I think there’s a colony of them somewhere in storage...”

Across the room, Green snorts and turns to go back to O2, catching Blue’s arm as they go. White sends Black with them with a wave and makes her way over. Her bio-reactive auxiliary teammate chases her heels, gripping her suit leg with its little robotic hand.

“Pink,” White interrupts whatever Pink is chattering about. As the two converse around him, Cyan does his best to shake himself from the morning’s daze and figure out what the fuck is wrong with him. What even was that? A memory? Certainly not; Pink is standing right next to him, perfectly whole. A vision of the future? Hah, as if such a thing as clairvoyance even exists.

A hallucination, then.

Not once in all of Cyan’s life has he ever been prone to hallucinations. This mission isn’t even half as exciting as most he’s been on, so it can’t be stress-related. Hell, this is supposed to be an easy escort job between bigger gigs: keep the cargo and crew of the Skeld safe on her journey through the Chryssipus Belt, disembark at Polus outpost, and catch a drop ship to the city-sized seeder vessel Sagan where he’ll assume a role as Head of Defense for the forseeable future. This mission is practically his vacation, so why in the universe is he having hallucinations about his crewmates killing one another? ...Was it something he ate?

“Cyan, report,” White says shortly—though not unkindly—and Cyan finally tunes back into the situation at hand. Pink is gone; White must have sent him off while he was consumed with his thoughts. Now it’s just the two of them and that damned scorch mark on the floor.

He’s worked with White several times before, so he knows she appreciates brevity. He debriefs her on everything: the specters he’s been seeing before he gets his morning coffee, the strange overstimulation and muddle-headedness he felt this morning, the hallucination. She doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t give any indication of what she’s thinking.

This could ruin his career, part of him thinks. A greater part of him knows he doesn’t want to be in charge of defending an entire damn colony if this new development with his mental health is going to be a permanent fixture.

When Cyan is finished giving his report, White rocks back on her heels and hums. “Report to Brown in the medbay and undergo whatever treatment he prescribes.” It’s almost like she can hear his jaw click open to protest, because she raises her hand preemptively and continues, “I know you don’t like being idle, Cyan, but I won’t have you running around my ship jumping at ghosts. Hop to it.”

With a sigh and a sharp nod, Cyan performs a perfect about-face and marches himself down to Brown’s domain. 

**Author's Note:**

> \- Chryssipus is one of the earliest astronomers to theorize the idea of multiple universes. 
> 
> \- “The seeder vessel Sagan” named after Carl Sagan, who proposed several planetary engineering/real-life terraforming projects on Venus and Mars.


End file.
